First of all, I've started adding my notes to the public wiki: GameDev Study Group. Your forum registration also applies to the public wiki, so you can freely add and edit the information there.

In other news, I'm starting to talk to some other area people who are interested, and we're talking about getting together somewhere.

I'm willing to meet anyone one on one or a few at a time just to get things rolling :-)

I met Dwayne, Luke, and Tom in Bedford in their conference room. They have all dabbled in C#, but they all have serious C++ and C experience. Dwayne used to work in the game industry too in the 80s and 90s, so we swapped some memories of ancient computing systems. After shooting the breeze for a bit, I described what it was I was doing with the C# and Game technologies, describing my run in with Managed Direct X (MDX) and XNA Game Studio 2.0. We talked a bit about art workflow, and the organization of XNA versus MDX. I complained a lot about bad documentation for DirectX, trying to find a good categorical class reference. We also talked a bit about motion tracking cameras and infrared. There was a brief side discussion about whether C#'s just-in-type compiler still kicked in with the games...I was hoping it didn't, because that would cause hitching in gameplay. You must be able to deploy pre-compiled bytecode...but I digress. We also got on a brief side tangent about how much power is in these modern video cards, how the entire rendering engine is hardware accelerated. I mentioned also that I'd heard of code libraries used for audio DSPing, using the GPUs to do the convolution filtering and so forth. I haven't done it, but I remember reading something about it.

So it was a very compacted information dump from me to the guys, unloading what I'd learned recently with my impressions. I briefly showed the tutorial code for XNA Game Studio, and also popped up Modo very quickly.

So that was it! Pretty short and sweet meeting. I think it was a good start.